The Grampian Quartet. Nan Shepherd

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СКАЧАТЬ control that comes of purpose; and her purpose was the getting of knowledge. There was no end to the things that one could know.

      Goerdie was still in his cups, metaphorically speaking, an honest joke suiting him as well as a dram; and Mrs. Ironside was grumbling still: ‘Garrin’ a body bite their tongue … I never heard …’; when Willie sprang on the top of the table and upset the bottle of ink upon Martha’s Latin version. She had written half of it in fair copy, in a burst of exasperation at the refusal of the second half to take coherent form. Now she sprang to her feet and watched the black ruin, staring at the meandering of the ink.

      ‘Ye micht dicht it up,’ said Emmeline.

      Emmeline had stuffed the novelette under her chin, pressing it there, head forward, to keep it in position, and had lunged out after Willie, flicking at his ear with the dish-towel. The lurch she gave as he dodged jerked the book on to the floor and Emmeline herself against the table; and the dish-towel flicked the ink.

      ‘Blaudin’ ma towel an’ a’,’ she grumbled; and then,

      ‘Ye micht dicht it up,’ she said to Martha.

      Martha gulped. She suddenly wanted to scream, to cry out at the pitch of her voice, ‘I haven’t time, I haven’t time, I haven’t time! What’s a kitchen table in comparison with my Latin, with knowing things, with catching up on the interminable past! There isn’t time!’

      She set to work cleaning up the mess.

      Then tears scalded her. Through them, blurred, ridiculous, all out of shape, fantastically reduplicated, she was watching her mother pick up the Pansy Novelette, bunch the towel beneath her arm again, and read.

      Martha felt her mouth twist. The reeking air of the kitchen choked her. Its noises hammered and sang through her brain. The room was insufferably tight. She pushed viciously with both hands at the wet cloth she was using, smearing the table still further with pale blue stains. She licked a tear from her upper lip. Quite salt. Another − she licked that too. Her eyes and cheeks were fired where they had run. … And the intolerable waste of mood! She had been saturated with the spirit of Latin prose − it had soaked in. Words, phrases, turns of speech, alert and eager in her brain, drumming at her ears, clamouring in an exultant chaos. And that last triumphant mastery, forcing on the chaos order and a purpose − the god’s security. Gone now. Spilt like the ink, as irretrievably. A worse waste even than the time.

      ‘Ye’re skirpin’ a’ ower the place,’ said Emmeline.

      Martha flung the cloth into the basin of water.

      ‘Oh why can’t you do it yourself!’ she cried. ‘Mother! You’ve more time than I have. You’re just reading. Just rubbish. − Oh, it doesn’t matter − I didn’t mean − you needn’t be angry anyway. It is just rubbish. And I’ve all my Latin to do for tomorrow.’

      ‘Latin?’ said her mother.

      ‘I’ll never get it done tonight now.’

      ‘Latin,’ said Emmeline again. ‘Fat sorra div ye need wi’ Latin for a teacher? Ye’re nae to larn the geets Latin, I’m hopefu’, an’ them disna ken ae year’s en’ fae the t’ither.’

      Martha moistened her lips. The hot salt tears had shrivelled them.

      ‘I need it to get a bursary,’ she said.

      ‘Oh, that’s something new,’ said her mother. ‘It’s the first I’ve heard o’t.’

      Stoddart Semple glowered at Martha. He was a long loose man, ill-shakken thegither. Useless laps of skin sagged round his mouth. ‘Nos et mat …,’ he mumbled, forgetting the conclusion. Then he broke into a tirade against learning. Abject the people who value what we valued once and today despise. Stoddart had hankered once after knowledge; once he too had stormed the fastnesses of understanding. The fastnesses unfortunately had stood fast. His father, who had jogged for a lifetime behind his shaltie selling smokies and finnan haddies to the country wives, and had jogged more pence into his pocket than wisdom into his head, satisfied the boy’s ambition and sent him to college. Strangely, not a professor among them could be found to endorse young Stoddart’s opinion of his brains. Old Semple would have bribed them cheerfully, the whole Senatus, Sacrist and all, to let the laddie through: but he died before it became plain that the laddie had stuck; and the old man’s transactions began and ended with fish. Stoddart sold the fish-cart and the decrepit horse, counted (in an evil day) his father’s savings, and from that day onward never did a stroke of honest labour. He lived alone in his father’s cottage, meditating projects to astonish the earth: soon he would have been glad to astonish even the parish. The parish had little use for a fine phrase, and did not know what to do with learning authenticated by no official stamp. Had he passed his examinations they might have listened to him, even without understanding; once he had been ploughed, they were at liberty to laugh. He let them laugh, but in a fury of contempt. He grew increasingly morose, striding by in a sort of bickering speechlessness. He shunned society: then mooned; then slouched, body and mind settling to a habit of slackness; his features coarsened; he seeded and grew stringy. His grudge against ungrateful man blackened and rotted his powers. The devotee’s indignation at the disdaining of his god had turned to a black and brooding madness on this one subject of himself.

      With the passage of years he ceased himself to believe in his discredited dignity.

      The neighbours saw the deterioration of face and figure, the hanging jaw, the rag-nailed thumbs, the sloven countenance; they saw refuse encumber his doors; the smell of his body scunnered them; they cackled at his clothing, sodden from exposure to every weather, matted and split. He trailed through any dubs, under any sky. A night prowler too, haunting the deep of the wood by midnight. His neighbours’ premises, perhaps, as well: who could know? Labouring folk sleep early and sleep sound. But there were suspicions anent him − queer ends of talk. A dark bulk − an indeterminate shadow − a malignant reeshle of the leaves without wind − sorry matters, but from them grew half-broken tales. A troubler of men’s imaginations, generating legend … a queer rôle for the stickit graduate. A looking-glass progression towards the object of his old ambitious desires … troubling men’s imaginations. …

      The neighbours saw the change in him − his rotting look: it was not for them to know that under the external squalor seethed horribly a spiritual regeneration.

      Stoddart had need of his kind.

      He blundered his way back into society by virtue of an inlaid dambrod. Old Semple had been a craftsman of sorts and had begun to fashion a dambrod of two varieties of wood, each square inset with patient skill. Death made a move on his board before the man’s board was completed. It lay where chance had tossed it, till Stoddart unearthed it one morning and set to work to finish it. No craftsman, he made a sorry enough job: but the board was ready for the game and Jamie Lowden liked a game fine of a blank and blustery winter evening. Stoddart carried the dambrod to Jamie Lowden’s.

      By what processes of pity, curiosity, persuasion, the dambrod gave him entry to other houses, would be hard to say: but in course of time, shambling, apologetic, he slunk his way wherever he desired: accompanied always by the board. He loved the bit of wood. He would shuffle round with it under his arm, ‘oxterin’ at it as though it were a body.’ Humbly at first, he ventured the piece of workmanship into view, claiming praise for his father’s handiwork; but careful to add that it was he who had finished it. By and by the squares that he had fashioned subtly shifted their position on the board. He was not oversure himself which he had made; and at the thought СКАЧАТЬ